Why the Red Sox should win it all this year

In my last Red Sox post I confidently predicted a World Series victory this year for Boston’s team — and got an earful from myriad Sox fans convinced I was jinxing them. So, I had silently vowed to stay mum on the subject until the Red Sox actually won. Well, I’m sticking to that vow — but I must link and quote others who comment on this topic. First, there’s Seth Stevenson’s hysterically funny Slate essay explaining why the Red Sox deserve to win the World Series more than the Cubs. It starts as follows:

Dear Casual Baseball Fan, I don’t like you. Casual is for slacks. It is time for you to pick a postseason team, throw your love behind that team, and live and die with its every pitch … to the point that you get sharp, clenching chest pains when Scott Williamson walks the first two batters in the ninth inning of a one-run game, and you yell, “Damn it!” at a decibel level much higher than you’d intended, and your girlfriend starts getting scared, and now she’s looking at you like she’s an 8-year-old whose parents are fighting.

Yeah, that’s about right (though, to be fair, Williamson was pitching his third straight day on the game in question). What’s really funny, though, is Stevenson’s last few grafs:

If the Cubs lost to the Red Sox in the World Series, no doubt Cubs fans would feel awful. At last, got to the gates of heaven and they crashed shut. That’s rough. But how would I feel if the Red Sox lost to the Cubs? I have previously suggested that I feel toward the Yankees as I would toward someone who’d shot and killed my dog. Given this, what would it feel like if the Cubs beat us in the big one? It would feel as though some pleasant, absent-minded guy had accidentally run over my dog in the street and not really noticed, and then clumsily reversed back over the dog as it yelped in its death throes. Then he started whooping and guzzling beer with friends, while still standing over the dog corpse. And all the while he still seems like a really nice guy who was hard to blame or dislike. Please don’t be that guy. Please.

Living in Chicago, there’s no way I can entirely endorse Stevenson’s amusingly blinkered logic, but to quote Chris Rock, “I understand.” In contrast to either the Cubs or the Red Sox, consider what Jay Drezner has to say about being a Yankees fan:

As I’ve repeatedly told my brother (a poor Boston Red Sox fan), I don’t even pay attention to the regular season anymore with the Yankees. I just wait for the playoffs. When you think about it, that’s kind of sad. It used to mean so much to a team to win a pennant…. [T]he repeated victories by the Yankees have become progressively less special. There is nothing like long-term adversity to make victory that much more special, and now I barely pay attention to the Yankees until the ALCS!

Yeah, life really sucks for my brother the Yankee fan…. grumble, grumble. [C’mon, you’re not going to comment on the Game 3 incidents?–ed. No, but I will link to David Pinto and say that even as a Red Sox fan, I agree with most of this statement:

I would suggest what is really bothering people… is that there was a shift of virtue from the Red Sox to the Yankees Saturday. When it was Nettles and Jackson and Rivers against Lynn and Fisk and Lee, it was easy to see the Yankees as the evil team that deserved to be vanquished by the Red Sox. But on Saturday, it was Pedro and Manny who caused the trouble. Here they were in game the Red Sox had to win, and their antics came close to having them thrown out. Up until Zimmer charged Pedro, the Yankees did nothing wrong. Someone watching a baseball game for the first time would come away from Saturday thinking the Red Sox are a bunch of evil jerks and the Yankees were just defending themselves.

Rob Neyer offers a counter to Pinto, but this issue is almost besides the point. The key to this year’s Red Sox team has been their ability to overcome the distractions created by Pedro and Manny while exploiting their prodigious talents. As this Providence Journal story indicates, the team realizes this:

“This team is so focused, so positive, you don’t see any change from day to day,” said [second baseman Todd] Walker, who, in a perfect metaphor for this team’s unlikely success, now holds the record for most homers in a single postseason. “That’s why we’ve been able to win so many games the way we have. This team has got a lot of heart.” Then Walker stopped for a second, and in that instant, it was as if he experienced a moment of epiphany. “I don’t know why some people still don’t understand that,” he said. “But I’ll tell you — we’re not going to give up.”

My prediction stands.